Mobile broadband is doing its triumphal procession around the world. For the operators offering mobile broadband, the users of mobile broadband are seen as a new customer segment which basically hasn't existed before. These customers are primarily looking for high speed connections to Internet with flat rate charging. The interest in operator provided services may extend to normal Internet Service Provider (ISP) services such as e-mail, but otherwise the interest for operator provider services is little or none. Basically just pure Internet connection, that is, a bit-pipe service is what is demanded.
The mobile system today is very feature rich and many of its features will most likely never be used by the mobile broadband customer segment. Therefore there should be a significant potential for simplifying the mobile system for this segment, thereby lowering the equipment costs and in the end allowing for more competitive flat rate fees. The need for having specific dedicated gateways for mobile broadband users should be even more important as laptop and Mobile Internet Device (MID) vendors start to ship their products with built in integrated mobile broadband modules.
The current technology to direct mobile broadband users to specific gateways (and Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN)) is to either to use subscriber information (e.g. specific Home Location Register (HLR) parameters or specific International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) ranges) or to depend on user equipment configuration of the Access Point Name (APN).
The dependency on subscriber information for directing a mobile broadband user to a dedicated gateway provides a challenge when a user may move his Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) between different devices, for example from his mobile phone to his laptop, when doing an Internet session with his laptop.
In the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard there are some standardized functions which are useful in the bit-pipe segment. One example is subscriber/APN based mechanisms to select a dedicated gateway. Based on subscription or APN configured into the mobile terminal, a user may be connected to Internet via a low cost dedicated gateway. Dependency on user equipment configured APN for directing a mobile broadband user to a dedicated gateway is cumbersome, difficult and costly for the operator to ensure a correct configuration in all the user equipments.